The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘bbc’

Bad news for the XP diehards out there, hard drive manufacturers are tired of supporting you, and the next generation of controller technology is not going to work properly with DOS and Windows XP users. Of course it won’t be a major issue until 2011, and maybe not even then. It’s been coming for a while now, hard drives are constantly evolving and becoming more efficient, and drive manufacturers want to be freed from the 512 byte sector size.

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Hard drive design leaving XP behind

Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career

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Planespotters arrested in India

This is pretty cool; I’m not sure how I missed it when it came out late last year. It was on British TV, I suppose, and with me not even watching much American TV, it’s understandable

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Vacuum gloves: climb like Spider-Man, look like Doc Octopus

Last week I met Gever Tulley, author of the provocatively-titled “Fifty Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Kids Do.” The book grew out of a 2007 TED talk about why embracing and exploring danger ultimately lessens it. (See! Good things do come out of TED. Let the TED-TechCrunch healing begin!) The book doesn’t advocate playing in traffic, but it does extol the virtues of things like super-gluing your fingers together, boiling water on the stove in a paper cup, and putting metal in the microwave.

He talked about the decrease in “tinkering” in America and linked it to Americans seeking an appearance of affluence, i.e. only poor people would try to fix their own sink, anyone else would call a plumber. Tulley is a big believer that this is bad for kids and by extension the country. I’ll take it a step further—I think it’s bad for American entrepreneurship.

There’s something about that tinkering, playing, hacking ethos that is core to what makes Silicon Valley, and entrepreneurship in general, exist. Nearly every tech visionary landed in trouble at some point for hacking, cracking video game codes, or phreaking– everyone from Steve Wozniak to Max Levchin. It’s the same mischievous curiosity that gets so many people excited about each year’s Maker’s Faire and the same desire that causes someone to jail-break a several-hundred-dollar device to see what’s inside or even toss one in a blender. It’s a core curiosity that adults have or they don’t, but almost all kids naturally have it. It can have risks, sure. But it also encourages creative problem solving, how to work within constraints and what rules can be broken and which shouldn’t.

I met Tulley because he was a guest on NBC’s Press:Here yesterday. He found it a nice change from The BBC, where interviewers excoriated him for encouraging kids to do something that could hurt them. And, well, that’s not surprising when you consider the British stereotype of restraint and aversion to risk and failure. Similarly, last November, when I was in India several Indians told me a big advantage the United States has enjoyed in business is that parents let their children fall down when they were young, encouraging an acceptance of set-backs and failure. In India there are protective bubbles of parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles who keep any harm from coming to kids.

Clearly, the important thing here is the line. There’s a difference between doing something unethical or harmful to another person and (literally) playing with fire because you wonder how quickly something might burn. But in an America that’s increasingly fear-based and protectionist a little danger, risk and failure might be just the thing the younger generation needs.

Tulley himself seems to practice what he preaches. He showed up to the set on crutches. How’d he hurt himself? Not skydiving or running with the bulls—he was just walking down the street.

Air superiority hasn’t been top news in a while. But Russia’s got a nifty new stealth fighter jet they’re showing off. Video after the jump.

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Stealth Jets. Now in Russian!

No small margins here. It seems that the iPad, while certainly not a cheap device to make, will end up lining Apple’s pockets considerably — if they sell any.

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iPad makes Apple ~$200-300 per unit

Well, son, I know you wanted to go to the moon and all, but it looks like that’s just not going to happen. In the meantime, I guess you’ll just have to be satisfied with a sojourn on the International Space Station

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Goodnight Moon Mission: Obama redefines NASA goals

Monday could have marked one of the greatest acts of trolling of the decade.

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We never named a mountain after Avatar. What are you talking about?

For the record, I’m writing these words on a MacBook Pro; the third Mac I’ve owned in the past twelve months. As I do so, I’m listening to music on iTunes through my standard issue iPod headphones, so as not to disturb my neighbours. Less than a foot from where I’m sitting, my iPhone sits charging. I am – as marketers might have it put – “a Mac”.

And yet – my God – I’m bored of reading about Apple and their ‘long awaited’ tablet.

Like most people who are broadly interested in technology, I set aside part of each day to catch up with the latest tech stories. Usually, out of loyalty and contractual obligation, I begin with TechCrunch, before moving on to Techmeme for a round-up of everything that my esteemed colleagues here might have missed. Between those two hubs, and the links I find on the latter, I can usually get a broad overview of what’s developing, what’s launching and – generally speaking – what’s important.

But not tonight.

Tonight no fewer than seven of the ten most recent stories on Techmeme concern Apple. “Apple calling tablet the iTablet?” asks the first headline, from Boy Genius Report. “‘Minor issues’ could delay $999 Apple tablet availability ’til June – report” says the second, from AppleInsider. Then there’s more speculation on the name of the tablet from MacRumors, a Business Week story about Bing – maybe – becoming the default search service on the iPhone; a guest post from TechCrunch about ‘Apple’s secret cloud strategy‘ – and so on and so on, ad infinitum, ad nauseum.

Of course, the front page of Techmeme isn’t the whole Internet – it’s just an algorithm backed up by a team of human editors. Perhaps they’re just having an Apple day. So I head for my go-to source of non-Valley-centric technology news: Rory Cellan-Jones’ blog at the BBC. Rory is based on London and so can usually be relied on to give a glimpse outside of the bubble. But not tonight. “Is publishing about to have an iPod moment?” he asks, before going on to speculate whether Apple’s new tablet will do for books what the iPod did for recorded music (Spoiler alert: he thinks not). And my erstwhile colleagues at the Guardian? Top technology story: “Apple looks for UK mobile partner for new tablet” Related story: “Apple confirms date for its ‘event’”. Its event being, of course, the launch of the tablet.

On every tech news site the story is the same. Apple, Apple, Apple: most of it reams of gushing speculation over the alleged tablet that the company is allegedly launching a week from today. And when they run out of things to speculate about, these professional journalists simply turn to writing about having received their invitation to the launch event, with its paint-splattered jpeg and its mysterious – by which I mean not mysterious at all – caption “Come see our latest creation.” Damon Darlin at the New York Times even wrote a post rounding up everyone else’s post about the invitation.

Enough.

Seriously, enough.

I get that an Apple tablet is big news. I agree with those who say that Apple’s product launches deserve more attention than those from other companies as their products tend to be ‘game-changers’. I, along with most other avowed Mac fans, will be tuning in to the webcast of the launch announcement, and – despite my cynicism over its threat to the Kindle – there’s at least a slim possibility that I’ll buy whatever it is that Apple wants to sell me.

But until the official launch announcement comes, I would rather not hear another word about Apple and their tablet. Not because it isn’t news – but because so many of the journalists anticipating the launch have dropped any sense of responsibility to their readers and replaced it with cloying fanboyism.

They claim of course that they’re digging for facts – the name of the new product, its price point, its specs – because that’s what reporters do. Bullshit. What reporters do is find out things that people don’t want us to know. In seven days’ time Apple is going to announce the name of their product, its price, its specs and much more besides. Revealing those things seven days early isn’t news.

At best it’s attention seeking: every blogger and his dog wants to be able to say “I knew it was going to be called the iWhateverthehell before you did”. It’s the same look-at-me motive that caused them to post their launch invitations online, like they’re received one of Willy Wonka’s golden tickets or a day pass to fucking Narnia. At worst it’s a bizarre form of fan fiction: gaggles of tech hacks who never fully left the schoolyard, scribbling out their own personal Steve Job fantasies for the approbation of their peers. “What will he announce? What will it look like? What would it be like if he had sex with Woz?”

What it most certainly isn’t is a service to readers. The vast majority of people who follow technology news – even those of us who are die-hard Mac fans – are perfectly able to wait seven days until the formal announcement, not least because we know that once the new Apple tablet hits the streets we’re going to be absolutely swamped with comment and analysis at the cost of any other kind of tech reporting for at least two weeks. Knowing the tsunami of hype that’s coming, any journalist who truly wanted to serve his readers would have the good grace to shut the hell up about Apple for a week and concentrate on breaking some real news while there’s still time.

So what do you say, tech hacks? A seven day quiet period? A whole week spent reporting actual news that will almost certainly be drowned out the moment Steve Jobs takes to the stage? Seven days where you stop acting like kids at school who can’t focus on their algebra because they know the Christmas holidays are only a week away? Seven days of shhhhhh before the inevitable orgy of journalistic seed-spilling over the wipe-clean screen of Apple’s latest miracle?

Six days?

Three?

An hour?

Here in the states, T-Mobile has been no stranger to screw-ups , but we’d always just figured that their UK counterparts were stand-up guys. After all, they’re British - as we all know, every one from that side of the pond is charming, affable, and rocks a bloody good accent

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T-Mobile UK employees caught peddling personal data